Shaker al-Abssi (1955-2008?) (Arabic: شاكر العبسي‎) was a veteran Palestinian guerrilla and Fatah al-Islam's leader. On 10 December, 2008 Fatah al-Islam announced that al-Abssi was believed to have been killed or arrested in ambush by Syrian security forces.^[1]

[edit] Biography

Shaker al-Abssi was born in 1955 in the Ein al-Sultan refugee camp near the city of Jericho, in the Palestinian West Bank. In 1967, he emigrated to Jordan following the Six-Day War which led to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank. Shaker excelled in school and moved to Tunisia to enroll in medical school, but the medical field was not really what he aspired to. Instead he wanted to get involved in fighting for a state of Palestine. Shaker al-Abssi then joined the Fatah organization of Yasser Arafat, which sent him to Libya to study and train to become a pilot. He succeeded his training and piloted a MiG-23 fighter plane during the Libyan-Chadian War.

Shaker visited his brother Abdel Razzak in 1980, who was studying at a medical school in Cuba, on his way to Nicaragua where he intended to help the Sandinistas. He remained with the Sandinistas for 4 to 5 months.

In 1982 when Israel invaded Lebanon, Shaker fought in the Bekaa valley area of Lebanon alongside Fatah. Then from Lebanon he returned to Libya and from there he traveled to Yemen and then to Damascus, Syria where he finally settled.

In 2002, Syria arrested Shaker and sent him to jail for his activities with a restricted Islamist organization and accused him of plotting against the Syrian regime. Shaker remained in jail for 3 years, during which he was sentenced to death in absentia by Jordan for participating in planning and executing the murder in 2002 of Laurence Foley, the US ambassador to Jordan at the time. The slain leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab Zarqawi, received a similar sentence for the same crime.

In 2005, Shaker was set free by Syria and moved to Lebanon to head Fatah al-Intifada, a Syrian Intelligence-backed splinter group of the mainstream Fatah movement based out of the Shatila Palestinian refugee camp in Beirut. A few months later, Shaker decided to join a strict Islamist group of about 100 other members and settled at the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp. There he formed the Fatah al-Islam Islamist movement.^[2]

On June 21, 2007, al-Abssi and 15 other accused Fatah al-Islam members were formally charged^[3] by Lebanese State Prosecutor Saeed Mirza in a criminal case accusing them of carrying out the February 13, 2007 bus bombings in the mountain village of Ain-Alaq. Al-Abbsi and other defendants were also charged with bombing two civilian buses on the eve of a Cedar Revolution rally planned to commemorate the two-year anniversary of the assassination of the former Lebanese prime minister, Rafik Hariri.

On September 2, 2007, al-Abssi was allegedly killed in the north of Tripoli. A body believed to be al-Abassi's has undergone DNA and blood tests, and the Lebanese army confirmed it to be his. A total of 39 Islamist militants were killed by Lebanese troops in a pre-dawn attempt to escape from the Palestinian refugee camp in which they had been besieged for three months by the Lebanese army.^[4][5]

However, a DNA test carried out the body did not confirm his death. The body discovered belonged to a man in his thirties, while Absi is fifty-six. The DNA was compared to samples taken from his brother and daughter, and were not found to match. ^[6]

In October 2008, he was reported captured in Syria. ^[7] However, other reports had him still on the run. In November 2008, after a car bombing in Damascus, al-Abssi's daughter Wafa was shown on Syrian TV along with other purported Fatah al-Islam members.^[8] On 10 December 2008 the group said Shaker al-Abssi and two other members had been ambushed by the Syrian security forces in the small town of Jermana, south of Damascus, and that he had been killed or arrested.^[9]

[edit] References

[edit] External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Shaker al-Abssi

• The Mystery of Shaker Al Absi Asharq Al-Awsat January 15, 2008
• Shakir al-Abssi at the History Commons
• Shaker al-Abbsi from Fatah al-Islam leadership